Research

I designed and distributed a Google Forms survey targeting home cooks across a range of household sizes and cooking habits. 18 respondents completed the questionnaire, covering questions on cooking frequency, recipe discovery, grocery shopping behavior, list-keeping methods, and pain points.

Who responded:

• Majority cook 4 or more meals per week, with several cooking multiple meals daily

• Nearly all shop in-person, 4+ times per month

• Household sizes ranged from 1 person to 5+, with $100–$1000+ monthly grocery spend

Themes & Insights

Reviewing responses for patterns produced four clear themes.

Theme 1: Ingredient orphans cause the most frustration. The most specific, recurring pain point was leftover ingredients from recipes — bought intentionally, used once, then forgotten. As one respondent put it:

"Remembering to use up the ingredients that I used for one meal and I have leftover of [is my biggest pain] — herbs, salad greens, etc."

"Not Knowing what recipes I can make with what I have [is my biggest pain]."

Another respondent was more blunt:

"If I try a new recipe, sometimes I buy really specific ingredients that I never use again."

Theme 2: People already want to cook from their pantry — it's just challenging. Several respondents described an improvised version of what Breadbox would formalize — choosing meals based on what's already home:

"I really want to use more of the ingredients I have."

"Combination of using up ingredients I have that need to be used and taking advantage of what is in season."

This validated the core concept early. Several respondents already cooked from what they had, working around the absence of any real system to support it. Breadbox just gives that habit somewhere to live.

Theme 3: Grocery tracking is fragile and personal. Respondents tracked groceries through paper lists, the Notes app, visual inspection of the fridge, and plain memory. No one used a dedicated pantry app. When asked why, the answers were revealing:

"It's easiest."

"I'm lazy.

"It's always with me."

Theme 4: Boredom drives recipe exploration, but time kills follow-through. The most commonly cited trigger for trying new recipes was boredom with the rotation. But the most commonly cited reason it didn't happen more often was time:

"Having the time! I really enjoy cooking more elaborate meals but I am so busy I typically don't have the time to plan them out accordingly."

"Just lack of time or better/more pressing things to take care of."

Affinity map

Turning Insights into Features

With features defined, the next question was where everything should live. I used a see/do exercise to map each screen — what the user sees versus what they can do — before touching Figma. This keeps information architecture honest: if you can't articulate what a screen shows and what it enables, the screen probably shouldn't exist yet.

See/do activity using sticky notes

Design Phase

Low fidelity: I began with paper wireframes and low-fidelity digital screens to map the core task flows. Lo-fi allowed me to test structural decisions quickly — where the Pantry lived in the navigation, how receipt confirmation should work, and how recipes would surface pantry-matched ingredients.

Exploring how a pantry item could link to a recipe

• (Left) The early recipe screen borrowed its browsing pattern from delivery apps — horizontal categories, featured content, high volume. That works when discovery is the point. Here it isn't, and the ingredient-match logic that makes Breadbox useful got buried under the same visual weight as everything else.

  
  

• (Center) The early Pantry read as a checklist. Plain text rows, no images, a "Find Recipes" button at the bottom — nothing about it signaled that scanning a receipt was the intended way in. The interaction model wasn't legible from the screen.

  
  

• The early designs included a shopping list, which seemed like the natural response to the fragile-tracking problem, but a shopping list inside a pantry app asks users to change a habit that's already solved — most people have a system, however imperfect. The simpler answer: copy needed ingredients to the clipboard so they drop into whatever list app the user already uses. Same outcome, no behavior change required.

• Earlier iterations used horizontal scrolling and featured categories, which pulled toward discovery. The final design is a vertical list, sorted by ingredient match — recipes you can make tonight surface first. Breadbox isn't trying to inspire you, it's trying to get dinner on the table with what's already in the kitchen. Three filters (My Ingredients, Cuisine, Diet) let users narrow from there without adding friction to the default experience. Pulling down opens search by name for users who already know what they want.

• The Pantry is organized around food groups, not an alphabetical dump or a running list. Meat leads because that's how most respondents actually plan — protein first, everything else around it. Food images replace plain text entries, which matters: a pantry that looks like a grocery haul feels usable in a way that a checklist doesn't. Within each tab, subcategory headers keep browsing scannable without requiring search. Swipe down to find a specific ingredient by name, same gesture as Recipes — one less pattern to learn.

• The "Use soon" tab surfaces items that have been in the Pantry longest — no alerts, no expiration warnings, no push notifications. The date each item was added only appears here, not on the main Pantry view. Seeing that eggs were added eight days ago is only actionable information when you're thinking about what to cook before things turn; the rest of the time it's just noise. Selecting items from "Use soon" and tapping "Search for recipes" applies them as filters on a new search. Looks like we're having beef and broccoli.